..."You are not who you think you are. Hardly anyone is."

Ok. Well, obviously someone told me. (Thus the quotation marks.) But not until I was 28. Not until I read it in a book and subsequently realized how much time and energy I had spent in my life pursuing something it appears I'm not meant to have a firm grasp on; who I am.

"I know myself, but that is all," Amory, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise cries in a triumph, of sorts, at the very end of the book.

And maybe therein lies the catch. Maybe you can know yourself. But at the cost of knowing absolutely nothing else.

I wonder.

I remember reading This Side of Paradise in high school and loving it. Recently I read it again and you know, not that I didn't love it, but it was almost as though I was reading an entirely different book. Proving the statement I opened with? Or maybe proving I am not the same person I was.

Who did I think I was back in high school? Well, maybe we should go one step further. Who did I think I was in Middle school? That's actually an easy question to answer. I was the smart girl. The high-achiever. The student who was asked again and again to present her work to the class. The student who subsequently (duh) became known as teacher's pet. But thinking about it in recent years I've come to realize I was less the smart girl and the teacher's pet because that's who I wanted to be. And it was more a case of default. I was not popular. I was not pretty. I was not really athletically inclined, my grade school abilities having temporarily deserted me with the onset of puberty. So, ipso facto, academia it was.

In high school that changed somewhat. The awkward, uncertain and insecure tendencies of the 'tween years faded and a little bit like the ugly duckling turned swan I came into my own. But intelligence and eloquence still remained huge aspects of the "who I am" that I presented to the world.

Just out of high school I got my first job working at a coffee shop. And I loved it. As any 18-20 year old quickly finds out when they enter the domain of the working in the end no one really cares how much you know. It's how hard you work that matters. And I found out I could work hard. And in working hard, I could not only earn a salary, I could come out of my shell. It didn't matter if I got straight As or what my ACT numbers had been. It didn't matter if I remembered how to diagram a sentence or could recite the elements in the periodic table. What mattered to the people I waited on day after day was whether or not I listened. Whether or not I cared. Before getting married I would have answered the "who am I" question with a statement that centered around my job in the public and how much interacting with all kinds of people each and every day meant to me.

After getting married I found quickly myself as a newlywed, living in different city, without a job or a car, struggling to meet and get to know ANYBODY and wondering why I seemed so alone, so utterly and totally lost. (A very common tale, I'm afraid.) Then I got pregnant. (Another very common tale) and before I was really able to come to terms with all the drastic changes in my life I added the most drastic change of all. I became a mother.

Everything I thought I knew about myself and about the world got turned on it's head. Who I used to be, whether or not it was ever accurate, seemed so far away it might as well have been someone else. Suddenly I was swimming in a sea of hormones and sleep deprivation and guilt and worry and spit-up. Don't get me wrong, I loved my daughter so very, crazy much. (Still do.) But that in and of itself was part of the problem. This love that comes into your life when you have a child is so unlike anything you've ever experienced before. And though you may be half insane because you haven't been out in days and you're still wearing maternity sweatpants and your last shower is an event you can't even remember and you just want to scream from the mundane "feed, burp, change"-ness of it all, your child looks up at you and smiles for the first time and everything is forgotten. All of it. Nothing else matters and the world, just as it is, dirty, baggy sweatpants and all, is perfect.

Which is real, you wonder later when you're looking back? (Like I am these days; with a daughter closer to 4 years old than I can believe and more grown up and independent than those intense first 2 years led me to imagine as possible.) How it is? Or how it seems? The wreck I was so often reduced to one moment? Or the so-in-love-with-my-child-nothing-could-faze-me mother I became in the very next moment after that?

The answer lies, I think, in the words of a very moving book I just read. (And highly recommend.) It's entitled One Hundred Names For Love and it's the true story of a woman caring for her spouse after a severe stroke leaves him unable to speak.

At the end she writes "I am in a phase of life with responsibilities I could not have imagined during my boy-crazy high school years in the heart of Pennsylvania, when the Beatles tunes suggested that love was as simple as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Like the teen years, this is also a passing phase. Be fully awake for it, I tell myself, pay attention to all it's feelings and sensations, because this is simply another facet of being alive, of life on earth, and then there will be another era when Paul will be gone and you won't have these responsibilities and worries."

Phases. That's all that life is. Knowing who you are is a never-to-be-attained reality because remaining in any one place for more than a mere moment in you life is also never-to-be-attained.

These days the books I read are (generally) on the lighter side and the world of periodic tables and diagramming sentences is a distant, foggy memory. My intelligence and eloquence have both stagnated. Instead, I know all the words to the "Cat in the Hat" songs, I can recite "If You Give a Pig a Party" and I can't remember the last time I called a toilet, anything other than a potty.

I don't get out much on my own. My circle of friends revolves around other moms and we get together so our children can learn how to play and share. I'm not exactly the "can talk to anyone, anywhere about anything" barista I used to be. Mostly I just find myself wanting to talk about my daughter. But seeing as how not everyone is as enraptured with her as I am, more often than not I just keep my mouth closed.

Even though I am still very much a stay-at-home mom my daughter is older now. She needs me less. I have more time on my hands. I can think about questions like "who am I?". I can come to the realization that I don't often know who I am. Nor do I always recognize who I used to be. I can even catch sight of my own reflection in a mirror and be surprised. (Because in my head I still see myself as the boyish and awkwardly immature 13 year old with short hair and glasses I was so long ago.) And I can write a blog entry about it all.

But in the end, it is just a phase. Tomorrow is not only another day but tomorrow I am another person, different than who I am today; whoever and whatever I decide that may be.

...that sometimes the abundant excessiveness of summer can become, well, excessive.

"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ... The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on."
- Robert Finch

Here in the Midwest, where summer doesn't begin to roll up it's sleeves and really get down to business until sometime in the middle of May, it always seems we are behind from the get-go. Like after so many months of dreary, unchanging, inhospitable Fall, Winter and Spring we are desperate to take full advantage of the nice weather. And we are caught in a game of catch-up.

If I've heard it once, I've heard it 17 million times..."There just isn't enough time to fit in all the summer stuff we had planned."

For there are church picnics and backyard cook-outs, Holiday fireworks and parades; camping, canoeing, fishing and hiking; neighborhood baseball games and tennis championships and rec. league soccer matches. In between all that fun the lists of must-get-to garden chores and lawn chores and outdoor housework chores seem to have no limit. Indeed, we spend all day outdoors, getting up at first light in the cool, quiet air on mornings when the sun rises earlier and earlier. And, likewise, we go to bed later and later, waiting for that same blazing sun to sink slowly away and the fireflies to illumine the still, humid air. We swim whenever we're near water. We eat ice cream every chance we get. We live in shorts and flip flops and sunglasses and slick ourselves over with so much sunscreen we might slip out of your grasp if you tried to hug us. We eat strawberries and watermelon and cherries and peaches until we can bear to eat no more. We devour in-season sweetcorn and tomatoes as though making up for lost time. (Which indeed, we are.) We plan family vacations and long weekends and road trips; often stacking them one on top of another until we haven't spent a full week at home in who knows how long.

And then we wonder, when that first sharp, crinkling, crackling hint of fall shows up one night in a cool evening breeze and the back-to-school supplies sit out on the counter and suddenly the porch light automatically trips on at quarter to 8, why we are oddly enough, ready for a rest.

A return to normal. A slowed down, paced existence. A schedule.

Growing up I always thought of Fall as the "dying" season. Though my favorite, there was, lurking in the background, that bittersweet notion of it being one big, drawn out goodbye; to all of the above mentioned things. Everything that had seemed so vibrant and full of life just a few short weeks ago suddenly begins to dull and brown and age. And while there's always so much beauty in that, there is also sadness. And grief.

But after reading a book about the seasons of gardening this spring I realized I had been looking at it wrong. It is not only us who are anxious for a bit of a rest come September. It is nature, too.

And that's what Fall is, I guess. A rest. Or more, a gradual wind down to a rest. Just like in any relationship, that crazy, dizzy, passion-filled rush of first love can only be expected to last so long, lest you self-destruct. And so, too, in nature, can the "intense midsummer relationship" last only so long.

So as the days grow short and the nights longer, as the blackbirds line the telephone wires and the geese fill the tempestuous skies with their loud calls, as the leaves begin to blush with color and the flowers in my garden grow gangly and sun-starved and weird, I will chose to look upon it all not as the end of something. Or even as the beginning of something else. But as a hard-earned, well-deserved rest.